I've been sporadically giving attention and energy to this project. At the outset my big picture goal was to better understand basic web technologies so I could converse more intelligently with programmers. In the past three months, I have studied mySQL and PHP in the abstract level and genereated very specific, working scripts that accomplished simple tasks. I learned coding vocabularly and syntax; the relationship btwn mysql, apache, and php; how to debug, at a simple level; and so forth.
This evening I opened up by two books, my working scripts, my phpMyAdmin, and started figuring out what to do next. It struck me that I wasn't feeling the flow, and haven't been the past few weeks. The prospect of developing more advanced scripts -- user logins, content management systems, rigorous data integrity tests -- just hasn't been getting me excited. So, I at one point had this goal of developing a 360 degree feedback system so friends could submit their forms online and I could collect and organize efficient....but it doens't seem worth it, because I'm not having a lot of fun. It IS fun to understand the basics, the barebones, and be able to talk intelligently and even look at PHP code, now, and understand its backbone, but it's NOT fun to spend several hours typing in a foreign language, debugging, etc.
I want to spend the final two months efficiently and ensure that I'm really dialed in to something that's at once useful and enjoyable. I think this means moving on to another piece of the web 2.0 pie and understanding it at a high level and trying to better understand how all these pieces come together. I don't want to spend the next couple months and develop really snazzy PHP scripts.